Page 12 of One Last Chance

Chapter 6

He might as well have beena tree for as tall and still as he stood. My heart leapt at the sight of him standing there and I scowled. I wasn’t a fan of conflict, and this one was brutal. Kash didn’t say anything as I approached, but as the moon broke out from behind a cloud, his eyes lit up like a thousand fireflies, shining with a hunger I hadn’t seen in ages. I melted clear down to my toes and crossed my arms over my chest to keep them from wrapping around him.

“God, I’ve missed you.”

Before the last word was out of his mouth I was swinging at his face, my hands balled into fists so tight my nails cut through my palm. Luck, or perhaps pure instinct saved him in that moment as Kash caught my wrist before my hands had a chance of connecting.

“Missed me?” I hissed, shaking like a chihuahua in winter. “You ignore my letters, you don’t write, you don’t call, but now you’re home and you—missed me? You can go straight to hell, Kash.”

“Been there. It didn’t agree with me. You’re talking crazy, hold on one damn minute and listen, would you?”

Hot tears spilled down my cheeks. I glared at him and wrenched my arm out of his iron grip. I ground my teeth against the onslaught of abuse I wanted to hurl at him and squeezed my arms tight around me.

Screw him.

Fuck him.

Missed me? After all these years. After all this silence.

“There. Thank you. Nice swing, by the way. You almost had me.” His cocky grin threatened to pierce through my rage, so I rolled my eyes away from it. Not that that got me any further away from him. Seemingly believing that he wasn’t close enough, Kash took a step closer. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was still shaking so hard I was afraid I’d fall over.

“Listen, Daisy. I couldn’t have ignored your letters because I never got a single letter from you.”

I scoffed. “Right, okay. Lost in the mail, that’s a great excuse. All of them? You really expect me to believe that out of the hundreds and hundreds of letters I sent you, none of them managed to reach you?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“You’re a damn liar.”

“That’s a dumb thing to lie about.”

“I never said you were smart.” I jerked my chin up against the flash of guilt which followed the hasty words. He didn’t react. I wished he would. I wanted him to scream at me, to give me a reason to unleash all the poison that had built up in my heart over the years. It was putrid, sickening, and so very heavy.

He ran a hand through his hair and chuckled softly. “I mean, that’s fair. Not the sharpest bulb in the box.”

“Tool in the shed.”

“Whatever in the wherever. You’ve always been smarter than me, Daisy. But that don’t mean you can’t be wrong sometimes. First three years I wrote you a letter every day. After that—well, a man can only take so much rejection, you know? But I kept writing. Every week, every month, whenever my thoughts got too big and I needed you to filter them for me—you were always good at that.”

I dropped my head so he wouldn’t see my face. “I thought about that. I figured you would have had some pretty big thoughts and feelings after everything.”

“Sure did. Only reason it took me so long to get free was because I didn’t have you around to talk sense into me. I’m sorry, Daisy.”

I curled tighter around the ball in my chest. “Don’t say that. Don’t you dare say that. Sorry isn’t good enough, nothing’s good enough. God, Kash, why did you have to come back?”

My words trailed into a wail and before I knew it his arms were around me. I sobbed into his chest, beating my fists against it, screaming words I can’t even remember. And Kash only held me, like the words I was throwing at him weren’t filled with insults. Like it wasn’t him I was cursing and hitting and fighting against. Holding me like he should have held me the moment we found out Hunter died.

When I was all out of steam, he started talking. Sweet, quiet, gentle murmurs, like a brook at the end of a hot summer. “I’m so sorry, Daisy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

“Nothing is okay.” I sniffed and scrubbed my face with my sleeve, then leaned away from him. “Nothing will ever be okay again.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “But that’s okay too.”

I stared at him, then a broken laugh scratched its way out of my throat. “What’s wrong with you?”

He shrugged. “I lost everything. Then I lost hope. Lost my mind for a while. Can’t come back from all that without changing.”

I looked up at him, wondering if I even knew him anymore. “And what did you change?”

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